Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively listenable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential

With the countless distractions that come from every corner of a modern life, it's amazing that we're ever able to accomplish anything. The Power of Less demonstrates how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary - freeing you from everyday clutter and allowing you to focus on accomplishing the goals that can change your life for the better

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

In keeping with the parable style, Patrick Lencioni begins by telling the fable of a woman who, as CEO of a struggling Silicon Valley firm, took control of a dysfunctional executive committee and helped its members succeed as a team. Story time over, Lencioni offers explicit instructions for overcoming the human behavioral tendencies that he says corrupt teams. Succinct yet sympathetic, this guide will be a boon for those struggling with the inherent difficulties of leading a group.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Leading Change

John Kotter, the world's foremost expert on business leadership, distills 25 years of experience into Leading Change. A must-have for any organization, this visionary and very personal audiobook is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition

Perhaps once a decade, a book comes along that transforms people's lives in a very real, measurable way. This is one of them. Crucial Conversations exploded onto the scene 10 years ago and revolutionized the way people communicate when stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong. Since then, millions of people have learned how to hold effective crucial conversations and have dramatically improved their lives and careers thanks to the methods outlined in this book. Now, the authors have revised their best-selling classic to provide even more ways to help you take the lead in any tough conversation.

Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

Communication is essential in a healthy organization. But all too often when we interact with people - especially those who report to us - we simply tell them what we think they need to know. This shuts them down. To generate bold new ideas, to avoid disastrous mistakes, to develop agility and flexibility, we need to practice Humble Inquiry. Ed Schein defines Humble Inquiry as "the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person."

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the groundbreaking best seller A Whole New Mind, comes his next big idea book: a paradigm-changing examination of what truly motivates us and how to harness that knowledge to find greater satisfaction in our lives and our work.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than 15 million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight. Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy - instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing - it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over

The Like Switch is packed with all the tools you need for turning strangers into friends, whether you are on a sales call, a first date, or a job interview. As a Special Agent for the FBI's National Security Division's Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you.

Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization

Flat Army arms you with powerful tools for overcoming resistance to change and creating a culture of collaboration, engagement, and employee empowerment. Your people are your most valuable asset, and if you want them to excel (and your profits to soar), you'll need to abandon your traditional command-and-control management style and adopt a collaborative, open leadership approach - one that engages and empowers your people. While this isn't a particularly new idea, many leaders, while they may pay lip service to it, don't really understand what it means.

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

Whether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence. Influencer is a thought-provoking audiobook that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life.

Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

Publisher's Summary

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict thats built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed best seller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems, the rational mind and the emotional mind, that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:

The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients.

The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.

The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Being a left brained artistic type, i'm naturally resistant to these sort of goal oriented psychology books. However, In an effort to challenge my beliefs, i've been reading several of them lately, and this is by far the best. I was a big fan of their last book Made to Stick and actually just read it for the third time. That book seemed a bit derivative of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point on my first listen, but i've since gone back to Made To Stick more than most any other book I own. Mostly because of all the practical, real world applications of interesting scientific experiments. Having just finished Switch, i'm impressed with how much they've outdone themselves. I didn't want to stop listening. There's almost no filler in the whole 8 hours.

I wasn't sure there'd be much practical use to a book about 'change,' but i couldn't have been more wrong. They reference several books i happen to have read recently, and i realized change is at the center of all of them, and Switch is the perfect synthesis of all their ideas. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who's read The Happiness Hypothesis, The Now Habit, James Hollis' books, or anything in the field of positive psychology. If you haven't read those books, save your money and just get Switch.

This is one of the most approachable and pragmatic books I've come across on behavioral change. Good examples, concrete, step by step. There is a lot to learn here, that pretty much anyone can find value in.

Audio quality is not so great, there are some weird jumps and pauses. The audio side feels several years behind the times, which is a shame because the content is really great.

The book has a number of downloads on the authors' website, but they should be referenced & provided here. The content of the book makes you want to have something to refer to, not just listen to the words.

This is a very good book for someone who's not familiar with the related literature (Dan Ariely, Helen Langer, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt). Even for those familiar with these authors, Switch may be a good read... except for the narrator. Imagine listening to a book read by one of those automated call services. The narration is just about as bad. It seems as if the narrator was asked to read each individual sentence in isolation, and then those sentences were stitched together. The result is pretty bad as one cannot rely on the intonation patterns of the speaker to decipher if he's still talking about the same theme or has switched to a new one. The narration also continuously makes reference to paragraph or subheading number, which for an audio book is useless. The result is tragic, as the book has a lot of interesting material. My suggestion would be to read the actual book or wait for the publisher to release a new version of the audio, which I would not be surprised to see given the number of complaints that the narration has received.

I enjoyed the book, not as much as Made to Stick, but it's worth the read. I'm disappointed in the audio editing (listened to format 4 on an iPhone) - varying levels of background noise (esp. chapter 5 or 6), painfully obvious edits where the reader mispronounced "IDEO" in chapter 7 (six or more references were obviously dubbed with difference background levels), etc. Aside from audio quality issues, there's a lot of numbering of thoughts/ideas which makes the audio format challenging.

The format of this book is not lend itself well to an audio recording. The chapters, section and subsections can be hard to follow, and the reader, however wonderful he may be as a James Earl Jones stand in, is not the right voice for the job.

If you enjoyed Chip and Dan's last book, Made to Stick, or if you enjoy their column in Fast Company, this is a somewhat formulaic product from the dynamic duo. I found their treatment of the topic to be a little elementary, simplified presumably for the lowest common denominator. For more academically rigorous intellectuals, I would recommend reading something in the area of behavioral economics, like Predictable Irrationality, rather than spending time on a drawn out metaphor about an elephant and it's rider. 3 stars for the book but only 2 for this audio recording.

Fantastic book. The intelligence behind the insights into why we act as we do offers a great deal of hope for the stuck. The reader unfortunately has one of these cheesy Hallmark Channel movie trailer voices that undercuts the common sense and inventive energy of the book. Malcolm Gladwell's own voice, for example, reading his own books, seems perfect, where this seems cheesy, and especially like the narrator doesn't actually understand the words he's saying -- is just acting them rather.

Has a many great ideas and message, narrated by a professional for sure, BUT I get so much more when its the actually author speaking.
Then I feel like I'm really having a conversation with the author.
Please re-release this in your own words, then I'll give it 5 stars.

I enjoyed Chip and Dan Heath's earlier book, "Made to Stick", so when the president of my company recommended this book on his blog I decided to give it a shot.

The subject matter is fascinating - what makes people change? How do we change our habits, routines, and personalities? Changing is quite possibly the hardest thing a person can do, and this book talks about how that is done.

The reason I didn't *love* this book is that it discusses ways to change in really anecdotal ways, some of the stories illustrate their point well, others only marginally so.

This is certainly not a "how to" book, though you can gather some ideas about how to apply the things they talk about, if you take a few minutes to ponder it.

I was expecting, or hoping, for more "how to" out of this book, but instead got a lot more "stories of change".

This books is filled with information about why people do or don't change behavior. I started taking notes during the second chapter so that I could remember to apply some of the ideas to my children. My only issue with the book is the narrator has a voice more suited for narrating a drama, mystery, or war documentary. Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from the book.

I love the real world examples! They were the ones keeping me hooked on the book - so many and so well explained! The theories behind it was not that exciting, but theories rarely are - so therefore it was just a super idea with all the real life examples.